1 the Immortal Imagination in Keats's “To Autumn” and “Ode to A

1 The Immortal Imagination in Keats’s “To Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” John Keats is one of the most well known romantic poets of the 19th century, an early death barring him from an even more celebrated career. His approach to the genre of Romanticism is unique in that he avoids any discussion of faith in the divine, rather seeking paradise through the union between humans and the natural world. Keats does not believe in earthly nor divine paradise, but achieves this ‘heavenly’ ideal many Romantic writers explore through the celebration of artistic expression. Keats expresses this sentiment in a letter titled “On the Imagination and ‘a Life of Sensations rather than Thoughts”. He writes, “The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.” Keats believes the imagination, which fuels creative expression, to be the most direct access to truth. A “life of sensations rather than of thoughts” is one that Keats’ sees to be most conducive to the life of an artist, who seeks to understand the world through his poetry. Keats uses his writing to grapple with the weight of reality and the undesirable aspects of existence, this poetic technique described by Andrew J. Kappel in his paper “The Immortality of the Natural: Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’” as an “an experiential escape from death.” (283) Keats addresses existential anxieties in his poems “To Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale”, using the natural world as a mediator to explore themes of mortality and preservation. “To Autumn” is an ode that centers the aesthetics of nostalgia, depicting a speaker who chooses to celebrate a season of change as a key stage in the rejuvenation of the natural world. “Ode to a Nightingale” is narrated by a speaker who seeks to escape the struggles of a mundane reality, literalizing this feat through inebriation and envisioning themself embarking on an imaginative, mythic journey. Within these two 2 poems, Keats’ creation of spatial and temporal setting, representation of subject-object unity and intertextual references to his own poetry contribute to his desire to resolve existence through art, using escapism to navigate both the joy and despair of life. Spatial and temporal setting in “To Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” are central to each poem’s meaning, but his use of this device is unique to each poem. His approach to setting varies drastically between the two poems; “To Autumn” mimics a pastoral in its fond recollection of a rural countryside in autumn, while “Ode to a Nightingale” crafts a fanciful journey through a warped reality. In “To Autumn”, Keats seeks to convey setting through use of cultural references to the rural countryside and personifying Autumn into a woman whom the speaker follows around the farm. Not only do these choices contextualize the poem, but also create a sense of nostalgia for the more domestic, pastoral lifestyle that the speaker escapes to. In “Ideology and Audience Response to Death in Keats’s ‘To Autumn’”, Mark Bracher reminds the reader of the different metonyms in this stanza that hold connotations of death. The images of reaping (16, 17), winnowing (15), threshing (14) and pressing (21-22) all “refer to different acts of separation that occur in harvesting…and thus embody the traditional signification of death as a limiting, separating event.” (648) These images of finitude, however, are counteracted throughout the stanza by images that produce a sense of “security, peace and contentment.” At the beginning of this stanza, the speaker happens upon a personified figure of Autumn in her “store” (12), where she is “sitting careless on a granary floor” (14). A “store” connotes an abundant harvest, with a variety of fruits, nuts and grain to sustain harvesters through the grueling winter months. This vision of plenty celebrates preparedness for the impending winter, rather than mourning the loss of warmth, natural growth and overall contentment. 3 In the same stanza, the speaker describes Autumn on a “half-reap’d furrow sound asleep/ Drows’d with the fume of poppies” (16-17). Poppies are a source of opium and can induce a powerful stupor, eliciting the image of a woman resting peacefully in a drug-induced haze. In Christianity, poppies are “recruited to represent death as a period of tranquil slumber” (Venefica), which Keats utilizes to symbolize natures descent into the winter months. This association is said to stem from red petals symbolizing the blood of Christ, making the poppy representative of resurrection and renewal. The speaker goes on to describe Autumn as she moves “like a gleaner” (18), steadying “[her] head across a brook” (19). Gleaners would collect leftover crops after the fields had been harvested, implying that Autumn is burdened both literally and figuratively – not only must she physically transport crops, but perhaps is growing forlorn at the thought of leaving this land to make way for winter. This image evokes a sense of nostalgia for the abundance of summer, but with the knowledge that Autumn will return in due time – she is not saying goodbye forever. Despite the connotations of separation and death that the language in this stanza carries, feelings of peace and restfulness dominate Autumn’s day. The setting Keats crafts is created through this imagery, establishing both a physical and temporal location that provides the speaker a mental escape to the warmer months of the year. This ode celebrates eventual death of all things tied to an appreciation of the journey it took to get there, leaving the reader with the comforting reminder that good things are never gone forever. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, the speaker escapes reality through Keats’s setting of transience and fantasy, nothing of the homey countryside visited in “To Autumn”. The mythical references employed in “Ode to a Nightingale” create the understanding that this poem is tied to neither place nor time, but follows the speaker as their experience of reality is confused with their imagination. 4 In the first stanza, the speaker refers to the nightingale as a “light-winged Dryad of the trees” (7), whose song he is enamored by. By comparing the bird to a tree nymph, “Keats stresses the naturalness of the bird” (Kappel, 4) and grants the bird both historical and mythical significance. This becomes of stronger relevance later in the poem, when the speaker laments, “Though was not born for death, immortal Bird!” (63), and imagines the bird preserved in history through its eternal song. In the fourth stanza, the speaker expresses his intention to fly to the nightingale, but “not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/ But on the viewless wings of Poesy,” (33-34). Bacchus is another name for Dionysus, the Roman god of wine, an example of Keats using metonymy to convey his wish to join the nightingale through poetry and not further intoxication. The speaker then reaches “the Queen-Moon on her throne/ Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays” (37-38). Here, Keats mythologizes the moon and stars into the kingdom of the night, to convey the speaker’s transportation to another world through their art. The speaker literally ascends to the moon and stars, the upward motion mirroring ascension to heaven, an otherworldly paradise accessed not by alcohol or a godly chariot but one’s own poetry. In the seventh stanza of the poem, the speaker is reflecting on all of the historical time periods and events that the nightingale’s song has persevered through. He imagines Ruth, a biblical figure, listening to the song “when sick for home” (68) as she stands “in tears amid the alien corn” (69). In the Bible, after her husband dies, Ruth chooses to stay with her mother-in- law Naomi and travel to Naomi’s homeland, even when she is allowed to return home to her family. This inspired a strong friendship between the two women, who in Bethelhem met a man named Boaz while gleaning in his field. Boaz shared his harvest with the two women, and eventually became Ruth’s husband (The Story of Ruth, the Gleaner). Kappel rationalizes the inclusion of this reference by explaining that, “one voice Ruth hears amid the alien corn is that of 5 the man Boaz. She finds herself in the cornfield because she has, like the poet, chosen to forsake her native land for a foreign realm. Boaz’ words, like the nightingale’s song, promote and sanction that movement to a new world.” (277) While there is no consensus on why Keats chose to include this particular reference, it may resonate with the speaker who is torn between two worlds – one familiar and the other alien, but home to a friend they are not willing to leave. Ruth stayed because Naomi, and perhaps the speaker wishes to remain in this fantasy world with the nightingale as his companion. This biblical reference also mediates between the two scenarios which precede and follow it – first, the speaker imagines the bird song heard “in ancient days by emperor and clown” (66), and only after the reference to Ruth envisions the song having “Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” (71- 72) The stanza shifts from the song being heard throughout human history, to the creative speculation of the Bible and finally to fanciful lands of fairies and magic. This trajectory mimics the journey of the speaker and the nightingale’s song, as it transports him from his human reality on a journey through a fantastically imaginative realm, one that can be tied definitively to any place nor time – it, like the nightingale’s song, is immortalized in the imagination.

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